Editorial: Washington conservatives playing with fire

Needing to juggle the monthly bills is never the best of signs. You set aside the electric bill in favor of paying the gas company, looking to buy a bit of time, hoping for some unanticipated windfall that will make it possible to pay the mortgage.

Many have known this drill. Many live it still.

No one wants to live this way. No one welcomes the worry, embraces the uncertainty. What folks hope for is to move beyond the juggling, to work out a forward-looking budget that keeps each month from being a crapshoot.

But now comes news – yet another undeniable sign of Washington dysfunction – that some in the federal bureaucracy have been contemplating a juggling act to keep the U.S. Treasury from defaulting. The feds would pay the interest on the national debt and worry about the rest tomorrow.

This, when one simple vote on the debt ceiling could make things right.

For years, folks who don’t exactly understand the workings of the federal government have argued for a Washington bureaucracy that operates within its means – like families across the land. Finally, they are getting their wish – except the model would be a household courting financial ruin. What’s next, asking furloughed federal employees to stop by the corner store for a couple of lottery tickets?

Remember back in the old days, when Republicans were sometimes called “conservatives,” when the two words were at times almost synonyms? No more. There’s nothing conservative about gambling with our future, risking everything we’ve built over nearly two and a half centuries.